Mechanical Animals

May 1, 2013September 22, 2024 RilalyLeave a comment

The next time something near and dear to your heart falls apart just hire a professional to fix it. I know, I know, this goes against the grain of every do-it-yourselfer (DIY) that has experienced the satisfaction of fixing it yourself, but we’ve tried to be that guy and failed so often that it’s time we admit that we’re just not mechanically inclined. If we are able to endure the room silencing, dish breaking stares that follow such an admission (and there will be stares, condescending, shaming stares), we’ll find that most of the staring contingent are not as mechanically as they think they are.

Enter the mechanical animal. As in any arena of life, there are those that have an almost inexplicable ability to fix things and those who don’t. This particular breed of mechanical animal is not determined through genetic isolation or selective breeding but they like to think they are. Some breeds are able to fix things, because that’s what they do for a living, and some have done it so often that they’re just better at it. “It ain’t rocket science,” one mechanical animal informed me.

Within the mechanical animal genus, a variety of species exists under the same archetype. At the apex of this archetype is the truly industrious person who, through trial and error, has learned to fix most things. For the purposes of clarity and distinction, we’ll call this species of the genus the mechanical beast. The mechanical beast is not necessarily smarter than any of their offspring, but they distinguished themselves in one vital area, need. If they didn’t fix the matter, no one would, and they didn’t have the money to pay those who could. The beast then taught his offspring everything they needed to know about fixing things. After years spent learning on the beast’s knee, we can’t help but be impressed by the knowledge this mechanical animal has, but if we do anything beyond raising an eyebrow, we’ll learn the continental divide between those who know such information and those who know how to apply it.

Within every species lies some level of natural selection, but as some have found through trial and error, some are not as capable as others in their species were. To compensate for their lack of knowledge, the mechanical animal focuses their energy on the field of mechanical accounting. They can recite for us an itemized list of the expenses we will encounter if we decide to hire a professional. They have intimate knowledge of how much parts actually cost, and they know the retailers the professional in question chooses for their parts and resultant costs they pass onto their customer. They have also memorized how much each company charges for labor, and all related expenses involved in going with such a high profile company. “Do you know how much you’re paying for their brand name?” they will ask us.

The condensed version of their presentation is that not only are we foolish for even considering the call to an expert, but we are engaging in so many unnecessary expenses. The subtext of their presentation also suggests that those of us who are not able to fix it ourselves are less than male, if the audience of their presentation is male, and it often is in such discussions. If we stubbornly maintain a realistic limitation of our abilities in this discussion, in the face of the mechanical animal’s intimidation, the mechanical animal will add seven words that will forever taint our relationship with one another, “Hell, I can fix it for you.”

My advice to you, if you’re ever in this space, is to just let this mechanical animal go. Let him explain how much knowledge he has in this area. Let him provide his intricately detailed three-to-five-to-seven-to-nine point plans on how they would fix your dilemma. Smile a smile of appreciation as they verbally dance about in their wheelhouse, nod a lot, and say, “Holy Crackers!” and “Man, you sure know what you’re talking about!” Dazzle them with your lack of knowledge, and keep your head in a non-confrontational and subservient position, and you’ll have a friend for life, but do not take this guy home with you.

He might seduce the desperate us with his conversation points that express the love and care he will show our home’s bolts and nuts, but soon after the lubrication is applied, the mechanical animal will start wrecking everything we hold dear. When the job is “done”, the mechanical animal won’t mind leaving a fella incomplete because the homeowner’s satisfaction was never the reason the mechanical animal injected their ideas into our conversation in the first place. The plan never involved them driving over to our house, screwing or unscrewing, or saving us one, thin dime. The purpose of the conversation was the conversation. They’re mechanical animals.

Mechanical animals have had this money saving and time saving three-to-five-to-seven-to-nine plan programmed into their head, note-by-note in the manner programmers program the notes of a Rachmaninoff tune into a self-playing piano. Like any song, every problem is fixable in programmed notes, but the difference lies in the variables. Mechanical animals are often great at communicating the intricate details of their pre-programmed knowledge on a lawn with a beer in their hand, but they often fall short when variables arise. They’re mechanical animals.

Mechanical animals are also great at informing a group of fellas on a lawn, with a beer in hand, that the corporate guys we’re planning on hiring are not as qualified as we think. The mechanical animal will inform us that he had a friend of a friend of a friend that hired them once, fourteen years ago, and that man wasn’t satisfied with the work they did. If we’re brave enough to proceed headlong into this gale of wind, we’ll ask, “Well, who would you hire then?”

“You don’t hire anyone silly,” the mechanical animal says. “You fix it yourself.”

This all makes for excellent “males on the lawn, with a beer in your hand” conversation, but it’s been my experience that the least expensive course of action for a desperate homeowner to take, is to smile, finish that beer he was gracious enough to slam into our hand, walk into the house, and listen to the conversation the females are having about the finest upholstery known on Earth. This conversation might not be as engaging to the male mind, but it will end up being far less expensive in the end.

The homeowner should not ask for another beer, or listen to further “guys on the lawn, with a beer in the hand” conversations regarding the mechanical animal’s expertise, with a twinkle in our eye, because we think we’ve finally found someone who appears to have some expertise. Doing so will leave the desperate homeowner with a half-assed fix and an inoperable dullness in the eye that will last the rest of our life on earth.

Mechanical animals are our neighbors, our brother-in-law, that guy who stops to chat with us at the local Home Depot as we stand in the aisle of his particular expertise, and just about every male that we know beyond a smiling nod. They’re mechanical animals –often named Morty– who have encountered just about every obstacle in life, and they can properly diagnose any problem we put before them in T-Minus two minutes, but we make the mistake of turning a dime on them, we’ll be screaming: “Houston, we have a problem!” in T-Minus two weeks.

As discussed, this breed of mechanical animal often has an archetype male sitting atop their personal totem pole, the mechanical beast, who goes into beast-mode anytime a situation that plagues man arises. Also, as discussed earlier, the mechanical animal wants you to know what they know, but the beast is an amalgamation of need-to-know. If this mechanical beast didn’t know how to fix the plumbing in his house, in other words, the family would have to learn to live without plumbing. A Morty type mechanical animal will often tell the story of the mechanical beast, often their father, going to a hardware store, picking up a pamphlet, and wiring the family home for electricity based on nothing more than the instructions that pamphlet provided. The audience of this narrative may revere those industrious, rugged individual characteristics of Morty’s archetype male, but Morty will temper that awe with a conclusion, along the lines of, “It’s not as hard as one might think, all one has to do is …”

Throughout the course of a Morty’s testimonial to his father’s greatness, we learn that Morty’s archetype male was industrious, self-serving, patient with the trial and error variables involved in fixing things, and undaunted by matters that leave the rest of us breathless, but, again, that knowledge was borne out of necessity.

At some point, the import of Morty’s fixation on his archetype male will unfold when he attempts to fuse his knowledge with that of his father’s. “The man taught me everything I know.”

We might consider his adoration his father almost a romantic sentiment, and we might recount some of our own feelings for our father, or we might wish we revered our father in the manner Morty does. As our admiration for Morty grows, as we realize how much this man loved, and still admires his father, we have to be careful not to fuse their abilities with their father’s. If we fall prey to Morty’s pitch, and we invite him into our home to display his ability, we might wonder when we fell for what this well-intentioned man was saying. A moment such as this one will be it. For in our desire to be as industrious as our forebears, we identified with Morty’s romanticized portrayal of his father, and we conflated our desire with his, until we were convinced of his actual ability.

Morty’s generation, our generation, loves the convenience that technology has afforded us, but the luxury of technology has also deprived us of the need that drove our archetype males to become what they became.

Reliance on this greater technology has left most males feeling less than macho, when we compare our knowledge to what our archetype image of a man dictates what it should be. As a result, Morty types spend their lives trying to replicate their archetype’s model. At some point in their lives, most Morty types realize that they have fallen short of this idyllic image. They know how to wire cable to their TV sets … with some margin of error. They know how to change their own oil, spot a car, and they can relay some inane facts about some inane car. They know how to mow and fertilize a lawn, and perform some perfunctory plumbing chores, but they pale in comparison to the archetype male of their lives, often their father, because they don’t have a need to be as industrious. This is where the listener comes in. This is where the listener needs to list the distinctions and be mindful of them while playing the role of circuitous conduit to the goal of the mechanical animal’s conversation.

Playing the role of circuitous conduit to this goal of the mechanical animal, allows the mechanical animal to touch the face of their archetype male, even if it’s just for one moment, on a lawn with a beer in hand. It also forces the listener to play the role of the idiot in their story, but the mechanical animal will love you for it, for as long as it lasts.

“A trained chimpanzee could fix that,” is something they might say from their newfound stature atop the industrious male totem pole, a place that the obliging homeowner’s open-mouthed awe has created for them. “If they were willing to put forth a little effort, a trained chimp could fix that for a Frito reward. What kind of man are you that you can’t?” Morty types often don’t add the latter, for most of them are polite and fun loving, but their characterization of the listener implies it. At this point, the listener would love to have their own idiot among the other fellas standing on the lawn with a beer in their hand, but most of us don’t.

“All you need is a telescopic, shrub rake and a milled face, framing hammer,” is the manner in which a Morty type begin such assessments. “If you want to call a fix-it guy, be my guest,” they say in tones that provoke compulsory responses. “If you want to go into debt, and listen to a guy demean you for not being able fix your own home that’s fine, but if you stick with me we can fix this thing in a couple hours for less than a hundred dollars.”

To be fair to Morty types, there are Morty types and there are Morty types. Some Morty types will confess, in typical Morty type humor, that they know “just enough to keep out of trouble”, or “just enough to be dangerous”. They’re often fun-loving beasts that may rear their ugly heads after they’ve had a few, when they’re with a bunch of fellas, looking out on their dilapidated lawn. It is not the goal of these Morty types to make members of their audience feel stupid, inept, or less than male however.

“Hey, you know your stuff and I know mine,” they might say to reveal how congenial, patient, and humble they are. If, however, the listener doesn’t make it a practice of lowering their head to the subservient position, the mechanical animal might feel a need to take them deeper into their weeds.

There are other Morty types, and everyone knows one, that will cause those that know anything about mechanical animals to dive into a row of insulation, at Home Depot, the moment we spot them working their way down the aisle toward us. These Morty types will lock onto overwhelmed, vacant eyes and giggle: “Hey Martha, writer dude here doesn’t know what a milled face, framing hammer is.” To which a more cultured Martha type will instruct him to, “Be nice Morty!” and he will, if there are no other fellas around looking at a dilapidated lawn with beer in their hands. He will, if the experienced listener finds a way respond to all of Morty’s quick-fix theoretical fixes with careful responses that provide the mechanical animal the illusion that we know something about what he’s discussing. He will, if the experienced listener adds something that alludes to the idea that they have some knowledge of the telescopic, shrub rake, and the intricate web of seductive knowledge the mechanical animal has.

The thing is Morty types do know just enough to secure a crowned position on the conversational mountain of knowledge, with a beer in hand. The moment after the desperate homeowner joins them up there, they will note that the mechanical animal has all of the same brown patches in their yard, and a board they’ve had covering a broken window on their garage for over a year. The homeowner might not want to call Morty out on these inconsistencies, but if they’re considering asking this man to fix the headache in their home, these are crucial notes to make. We also need to make note of the fact that the bed in their spare bedroom collapses when a man that weighs under 200 pounds climbs on, and even though he installed his own saloon doors on all of his rooms, we need to make note of the fact that they won’t close properly.

Once a guy leaves the idyllic conversations on a lawn, and they remove their beer goggles, they witness the realities baked in a foundation of half-truths and makeshift aggrandizements. We do need to note, however, that Morty types are not attempting to deceive us into believing they know how to fix whatever ails our home. Most of them know what they’re talking about on this subject. They know the logistics of the fix, and they know how to go about getting things fixed, but they just don’t do it as well as we thought we were when we were all starry-eyed over their knowledge.

Those of us who have made the mistake of turning a dime on these conversations have realized our mistake soon after saying:

“Well, hell, if you can fix this for half the costs, then you are my man!”

If the reader is anything like me, it was never our intention to expose them for who they really are. We wanted our flawed home fixtures fixed, and we were so desperate that we didn’t take the time to look for the realities of the man’s ability in another man’s home, in his garage, or on the dilapidated outskirts of his lawn. If you’re anything like me, you’ve made the mistake of not knowing the difference between mechanical animals and the mechanical animal conversations that occur on a lawn, with a beer in hand, with a bunch of fellas standing around.

If you do let Morty-type mechanical animals in your home to fix the very basic tasks that you can’t, let them go. They love to talk about anything and everything throughout the chore they’ve been generous enough to fix for you. The mechanical animal might know what they’re doing in this arena, and they might even be able to fix what is required, but you should know that you’ll be making a huge mistake by leaving them alone in the room that needs some fixing. It would be rude, of course, to invite them into our loving home and just leave them to fix it, but that doesn’t cover what we’re discussing here. What we’re talking about is placating to the desires of a mechanical animal that is kind enough to attempt to relieve your headache without pay. To do that, those of us who have experienced such things firsthand, advise the reader to affix vacant and overwhelmed eyes on them, and say, “Wow!” and “Holy Crackers, you’re smart!” a lot. Let the mechanical animal provide detailed instructions on how to maintain, or fix, your problem in the future. The listener might not retain a single word of the diatribe, but that is not the goal of the mechanical animal. The reason that they collected the necessary tools for your project, and drove over to your home was to have you listen to all the knowledge that they’ve accumulated over the years.

My experience with Morty types is that it’s also not enough for them that their audience promise to pay them, for nine times out of ten Morty types don’t need the money, or the steak we’ve promised them if they can fix a something something that’s plagued us. It’s also not characteristic of Morty types to like the homeowner so much that they’re willing to fix something for them just because, and my advice is to keep filling those voids with various forms of those “Wow!” and “Holy crackers, you’re smart!” responses. Chances are, if the homeowner is an inexperienced observer, with no precedent, they might find these expressions tedious after a time, or they might believe that these mechanical animals will work harder, better, and/or faster if we leave the room to get them to stop talking about what they’re doing and just do it. That homeowner will realize the huge mistake they’ve made soon after the mechanical animal climbs down the ladder, saying they need to get a milled face, framing hammer from home, and the homeowner is left calling that “over-priced” professional three days later, paying far more than they would have if they had just called him in the first place.

Self-Discovery

March 31, 2013May 25, 2020 Rilaly1 Comment

The term self-discovery causes most people to squirm. Most people associate self-discovery with new age types who wear goatees and skullcaps with Rasta stripes on them. Most people who want to get in touch with their inner child find controlled substances to be the best transportation devices when used in conjunction with Arthur Janov’s Primal Scream Therapy. Most people associate self-discovery with people getting nude and judging all their fellow nude participants in asexual, spiritual, and beautiful ways. It doesn’t have to be this way.

We’ve all watched cable presentations document some forty something, in swaddling, trying to spiritually relive a moment in time that they believe was stolen from them by circumstance. We see these people as violating “normal” maturation methods and immature individuals that want people to see them in a manner no one has looked at them before. Most people view the term self-discovery as self-indulgence for the self-indulgent. Most people have had the term self-discovery bastardized so often that the term makes them squirm when they hear it.

My grandfather’s generation, the WWII generation, held stoic silence as a key to happiness. They didn’t speak of the events of their lives for the simple reason that they didn’t want to relive the horrors visited upon them. The characterization of this generation is that its members learned to forget more life than subsequent generations will ever know. If that’s true, we could add that they know, perhaps better than we do, that sometimes forgetting is a key to a sound mind.

Others would tell you that the WWII generation exhibited a degree of humility that has been lost on subsequent generations. The final attribute that I’ve heard attributed to those who don’t speak of their lives is that the generation before them told them not to speak of their concerns so often that it was ingrained. To the WWII generation, talking about the pressing matters of their lives equates to complaining about them, and they believe it’s self-indulgent to do so.

The result for those of us that sat on the knees of the WWII generation is that we didn’t know anything substantial about them, until they passed away. How many times have we heard a member of my generation say: “If I had only known this person while they were still alive, I could’ve had such a much better relationship with them.” My grandfather wanted to be the best grandfather ever, and he did so by being there for me. I defined our relationship, and he would acquiesce to all of my needs and wants. When my grandmother would tell him to tell me some of his stories, he would say, “He doesn’t want to hear about that,” and I didn’t. Yet, I didn’t learn how proud he was to be an American, regardless the atrocities he saw committed in her name. I didn’t learn what his parents had to go through as immigrants and what they did to survive and thrive after the depression. I knew him as my grandfather, and I remember him doing everything he could to make me laugh and love every minute I spent around him, but I didn’t learn the essence of the man until he passed away.

When we see our generation’s “self-discovery” types go on daytime talk shows, and Facebook, to reveal every intimate detail of their lives, we cringe. We think our forebears may have been onto something with this whole humility through silence. The alternatives are nothing short of embarrassing.

There is a middle ground. There is a way to let loved ones know the nature of our existence without going overboard and getting sappy. We don’t have to weep when we tell tale of our overbearing father, or the bully who tormented us in high school, or our feelings in general. There is a way to pass along that which we’ve learned in life to those sitting on our knees who are dying to learn what we know. The consequence of doing otherwise is that everything we learned in life will die on the vine, and our knee-sitters will be prone to make the same mistakes we did.

The non-emotional, reflective person can learn who they are by pulling the onion layers away to discover their true core. Is it important to learn who we are by dissecting our past and learning who we are by dissecting the information of who we were? I think it is, but as with anything else moderation is the key. Should you sit in a circle and open up to a support group? Most of us will not do what, but we can relive our past, through the knee-sitters, and teach them some things that are so distant that we forgot about them.

When they’re sitting on our knee, we can live our life vicariously through them, by recounting the life we’ve lived. Will they learn enough to avoid making similar incidents in life, probably not, but they can use our knowledge in conjunction with their own experiences to make their lives a little better.

Self-discovery is what new agers call it, and these new agers engage in self-discovery by getting in touch with their inner-child. Their sentences always start with the ‘I’ word, and they expect you to smile with a sigh when they openly reflect. Do you love yourself as you are? Do you think about whether or not you love yourself? You may either have too much time on your hands, or you may be suffering from an acute case of what medical science calls self-indulgence, and it doesn’t have to be that way.

I’m a Little Bit Polka, and a Little Bit Rock and Roll

March 27, 2013November 8, 2023 Rilaly2 Comments

I used to think I was a rock and roll dude, and I mean totally … when I was around a bunch of polka people. I might never have been as avant garde as I thought, but I’ve been informed, of late, that I’ve become anything and everything but rock and roll. I’ve become polka. I found this out at dinner one night, when a real rock and roller rebelled against a polka comment I made. It didn’t completely surprise me that she considered me the vanguard of traditional thought –that needed to be squashed for the purpose of her attaining a rebellious, rock star personae– it did surprise me, however, to find out that I was only polka, but I liked it.

I, too, used to regard societal norms as something in need of a good squashing. I used to think those who ascribed to traditional thoughts did so in a 1950’s, Leave it to Beaver, and uninformed manner, until I realized I was doing what I was told. The avant garde informed me that if I wanted to be considered dangerous, risqué, and avant garde, there was a distinct set of beliefs to which I must adhere.

Back when I had no idea who I was, or what I wanted to be, but I was willing to do just about anything, and say just about anything, and be just about whatever I had to be to have one person confuse me with a dangerous, Jimmy Hendrix lick, or a controversial and provocative John Lennon lyric. I wanted to be indefinable, complex and cool, because I didn’t know what I had to do to fill my basket yet, and it disgusted me when others, so sure of themselves, did. What my friend said to me the other weekend was that indefinable, rock and roll something that I would’ve said to my own polka people, twenty years prior, and my reaction to her comment was as silent as my recipients’ were.

Why was I silent? I didn’t know what she was trying to say, and I didn’t see the value in it. If I displayed confusion in the face of that comment and said, ‘What?’ she probably would’ve gotten off on that. I know I would’ve, in my rock and roll days.

‘Nothing,’ is what she might have responded had I made the fateful decision to say ‘What?’ and she probably would’ve done so in a deliciously dismissive manner. ‘You wouldn’t get it if I told you, and you probably never will,’ is something she might have added, and she probably would have considered that whole dinner discussion delicious.

It dawned on me that when I used to say such things to the polka people around me, it was as confusing to me then as it is now. I didn’t know what I was talking about back then, but I wanted to be the apathetic, complicated characters I saw in the movies and heard in my tunes. I thought those actors were so cool rebelling against complicated matters they knew nothing about, and I used the catch phrases and song lyrics they taught me to dismiss the polka people. I thought their lyrics were so delicious that they afforded the characters a persona that suggested they were the only ones who truly knew about the matters they were discussing. I wasn’t sure if I didn’t have enough confidence to pull it off, but for some reason no one was as affected by my presentation as those character actors were in the movies.

“What are you rebelling against?” was a screenwriter’s line a female actor used in the movie The Wild One. “Whaddya got?” The male actor responded with another of the screenwriter’s lines.

Translation: ‘I don’t know what I’m rebelling against. I’m too young, and too uninformed to rebel against anything of any substance, but isn’t my indefinable rebellion cool?’

‘Lines like these and other lyrics from the rock and rollers are great and all,’ I wanted to say to my fellow rock and roll rebels, ‘but I got all these other guys hammering me for more details, because I don’t know what I’m talking about. You have to give me something more here.’

Undefined rebellion in songs and movies are so cool, and the idea of rebelling against the norm, the status quo, or the “whaddya got?” is the epitome of greatness, until the various theys in our life kill the messengers for not knowing what we’re talking about. What are we rebelling against exactly? We don’t know, and the rock and roll rebels don’t know either. If they know, they’re not telling us, because they enjoy the cool deflector shield they wear that suggests we’re not supposed to ask. Those who do know, know that it’s something beautiful and indefinable. It’s something that the important, dangerous, and attractive know, and if you don’t, what are you doing here anyway?

I spent some time around rock and roll dudes, in my rock and roll days, and they were adamant that “I don’t get it, and I probably never will”.

“I don’t,” I said when I reached an age where I was confident enough to admit it, “explain it to me.” I was confident enough to admit that I wasn’t a rock and roll dude, but I wasn’t so confident that the latter line was a confrontational challenge to their beliefs. I was not a person who believed that there was some intrinsic value to being uncool. I wanted to know what they knew, and I would’ve loved if they tossed the keys to the “it” world to me, but it wasn’t such a driving force that I was willing to do whatever it took to get there.

I now know there is no secret formula. “It” is an idea steeped in superficialities. If you have an “it” look, you have “it” without being required to get “it” qualities. If you don’t, and you want in, you have to believe in those who do. You have to have faith in the otherwise quiet, cool kids who use a catch phrase or a song lyric to condemn those with a polka mindset. Unquestioned allegiance to the unquestioning allegiance of what the “it” crowd believes can lead a messenger to being an avant garde rock and roll rebel that some confuse with an independent thinker.

With all of those contradictions in mind, when my dining companion confronted me with the idea that I’m no longer a little bit polka, and a little bit rock and roll, because I’m not the least bit rock and roll, I took it for what it was, because I knew she couldn’t define the alternative any better than anyone else could. No one can explain it, of course, and although I’ve never been the best student of what “it” is, because I’ve never had “it”, I now know what I have to buy to get “it”.